Tag Archives: Ursula le Guin

For this week’s prompt I chose to illustrate emptiness. Not that I think emptiness is a bad thing. I consider it more as the “negative space” defined in art as “the space around and between the subject(s).” In art, empty space can be used to create a silhouette, a background, a balancing counterpoint to an object or group of objects, or a place for the eye to rest. In life, emptiness can give the mind or heart or emotional body time to rest, recuperate and regroup. In metaphysics, emptiness is the void from which the spark of life arises and in physics emptiness is the great mystery.

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.

Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

Sometimes we need emptiness to understand the true utility or meaning of a thing, concept or action. When we first read this story we found it almost devoid of content; but the longer we spend with this seemingly empty story, the more it holds.

Genesis tells us that in the beginning was the sea – … and God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” The Judeo-Christian religion is not alone in thinking the world evolved from water; many other theologians, scientists and psychologists agree. The sea encompasses this story – the story bobs up out of its depths. This fact alone is enough to make us sit up and take notice.

The watery background of this collage forms the negative space around two objects, the fish and the boat carrying a woman and her sand castle. You may recall that the sea changes its appearance and mood each time the fisherman makes a new request. When he approached the shore to ask for the castle, the sea “looked blue and gloomy, though it was very calm.” The sea here is blue and a bit gloomy and very calm; empty of any kind of disturbance. It conveys a brooding season of waiting.

My idea of Hell is waiting in an endless line without anything to read. I really dislike waiting. So my personal negative space carries undertones of frustration and impatience. I suppose it’s why I fall in so easily with the idea of “staying in the moment.” If the moment is all there is, then one never has to wait! The trick is practicing this sense of presence in the dentist’s waiting room!

The fisherman’s wife is adorned with elaborate seashells. If you hold a seashell to your ear you can hear the ocean. What needs to be heard? Who needs to be listened to? For me, sitting on an empty beach surrounded by the rhythmic sound of waves is the closest I get to perfect harmony. I suppose it’s a point of arrival. At the very edge of the known world there is nowhere left to go, nothing to do except be one with the elements.

Shells are wampum, a form of money in both South American and African history. The conch, sliced cross-ways, forms a perfect spiral, ancient symbol of rejuvenation and rebirth. Gods are born from seashells and this is the wife’s ambition – to become a god. Transcendent religions teach us that it is humankind’s best and truest aspiration to reclaim his/her god nature. To do so usually involves a trip to the underworld, as represented in the traditions of many sea-faring nations.

The wife in my picture is plump, naked and crowned in a rather ridiculous headdress, all of which might indicate empty (endless) greed and desire. On the other hand she also appears poised, calm and completely self-confident. Perhaps, her crown connects her to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Perhaps, her actions in the story stem from a profound comprehension of the workings of fate and the sea.

Her castle is made of sand – transient, ephemeral, easily washed away it’s a thing of illusion, yet the child’s pink bucket has been left in plain sight. Children are naked and truthful in the expression of desire; they know how to play and use their imagination.

The boat, a tool of the fisherman’s trade, has become a frivolous pleasure boat. If this collage were the fisherman’s dream, we might ask him if his work gives him pleasure. Is he “following his bliss?” as Joe Campbell would ask. If so, does the fish bless him by returning him, at the end of the story, to the profession he loves?

The golden fish is as enigmatic as any fish. Why does he do what he does? His mouth is open to speak, but he also bleeds from it. (Remember the bloody streak in the water when the fisherman lets him go free?) Bleeding is a kind of emptying out and links the story, once again, to the feminine. It also implies the kind of sacrifice in blood that magic and gods sometime demand.

The wounded Fish/Prince is reminiscent of another story – Parsifal and his encounter with the wounded Fisher King. In that story, the hero, long dominated by an overprotective mother, doesn’t ask the questions he should ask at the beginning of the story. As a result he must take a long roundabout adventure that brings him back to where he started.

There is one more story I’m reminded of. The “Arabian Nights” contains a tale about a fisherman who nets a jar containing djinn who threatens to kill him when the fisherman uncorks his catch. Through trickery, the man talks the djinn back into the jar and then returns the imprisoning container to the sea. To me, our story seems like a reverse mirror image of that one. In both, magical creatures, fishermen and the sea are involved and in both stories the characters end up in the same place they began. As in the tales from “A Thousand and One Nights,” our story contains the seeds of another wonder tale. How and why has the enchanted prince been turned into a fish?

The story of the Fisherman and His Wife contains plenty of emptiness in which one may float questions; lots of room into which imagination may expand …